It was snowing lightly on Wildcat Mountain …

as I worked 24 hunters this morning at Wildcat Mountain State Park, K-1480. It drizzled all night, on & off, it was still drizzling as I loaded the car and drove to the park; as I was unwinding the antenna wire I saw the first few snowflakes. There was a brief period of snow pellets, changing to regular snow which was still falling as I took down the antenna and packed up. Somewhere between the park and Hillsboro it turned back into drizzle which gave me the idea that the type of precipitation might be related to altitude. It is still drizzling as I type this after dinner and submitting my log.

I was planning to operate from the picnic shelter, but a sharp wind from the west quickly convinced me to go back to the car. I was also planning to use the base-loaded whip that I constructed earlier in the month on the tabletop, but while packing in the pre-dawn darkness I left it on the bench in the hallway. I did have the QRPguys No-Tune EFHW however, which I have also been wanting to try out, so I unwound the wire, attached a length of twine, and tossed it over a low tree branch.

A 3 foot length of RG-316 coax from Cables Online on Amazon connected the radio to the circuit board / winder of the EFHW antenna.
One of the cool features of the X6100 is the SWR Scan function in the APP menu. Since I had never used this antenna before, I ran a scan just to see what was what. Clearly I need to trim the wire a bit when the weather is a bit milder; SWR was 2 to 2.5:1 across the band so I used the internal ATU.

I did it the easy way: I found a vacant frequency, started CQing, and self-spotted. 24 hunter contacts resulted from 33 minutes on the air; thank you, hunters!

The battery in that position helps keep the microphone cord from pulling the radio out of its place on the dashboard. Maybe I need a pair of Velcro strips.

It was 36 degrees F, so the snow was melting on contact.

That was fun in spite of the weather! Thanks for visiting driftlessqrp.com!


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